There’s No War Here Unless They Bring One – How Political Theater Fuels Division in America

Written by James Marlin, Investigator, Journalist & Keynote Speaker

James Marlin is a professional questioner, storyteller, dad, and husband with a passion for investigating. He works to distill complex findings into actionable and relatable information through his written articles and keynote talks. Having battled and overcome addiction, James firmly believes in the power of change.

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Texas spent more than $221 million busing migrants to northern cities, then sent its soldiers to “restore order” in the very places it destabilized. This isn’t law and order. It’s political theater, paid for by taxpayers.

I was born in Nashville, Tennessee, and raised on red clay and Southern manners. I’ve lived in Huntsville, Alabama, Tampa, Florida, and Austin, Texas. I know what it means to grow up in the South with all its warmth, pride, and contradictions. I loved my time there. Then I married, and my wife said the words that terrified me: "Let’s move to New York City."

I’d never been there, but I’d heard the stories. Crime. Chaos. Danger. I was intimidated. But I’ve lived here three and a half years now, and any self-respecting New Yorker can tell within three seconds that, “I ain’t from ‘round here.” And still, this city and the people in it accepted me.

My job takes me into every borough, every kind of neighborhood. I’ve walked the polished blocks of Manhattan and the cracked sidewalks of the Bronx. I’ve seen kindness in bodegas and quiet generosity on subway platforms. And springtime in New York, with the trees bursting through the concrete, and the city returning to life after winter, is one of the most joyful things I’ve ever been around. I’ve seen both the beauty and the hardship.

Just as I saw in every southern city I’ve called home. In all that time, I have never been assaulted, never robbed, never afraid. My wife and teenage son walk the same streets. We go to the parks, ride the trains and buses, and eat out when we can afford it. So when I read that federal troops might be deployed here, for our “protection,” I felt fear for the first time.

Not from my neighbors, but from my government. If soldiers in camouflage were patrolling the corners I walk past every day, then I would be afraid because there is no war here. No insurrection. Only people living their lives.

The peculiar thing is that the most frightening experiences I’ve ever had, the break-ins, the thefts, the violence, happened back home in Tennessee and Alabama, not in New York. Nashville’s East Trinity Lane in the 1990s wasn’t exactly Disneyland. Yet nobody ever called for troops there. Nor did I ever think they needed to. Every city has good and bad neighborhoods. The bigger the city, the more of both. But labeling an entire place “unsafe” because of its politics isn’t the truth, it’s propaganda.

A manufactured crisis

Let’s start with the truth. Texas spent over $221 million to bus migrants from its southern border to cities like New York, Denver, Philadelphia, and Chicago, where more than 35,000 migrants have arrived from Texas alone.

The average cost? $1,841 per person.

Who pays for this? Texas taxpayers.

Less than one percent came from private donations. The rest is money pulled from public safety, health, infrastructure, and human services accounts, as well as the state’s emergency management and Operation Lone Star budgets.

In short, Texas’s deployment is not a free ride. It is paid for by state taxpayers. Then, in October 2025, Governor Greg Abbott sent 400 National Guard soldiers to Chicago. Another multimillion-dollar operation. A militarized encore to the humanitarian crisis he himself initiated.

Texas paid to create the emergency, then paid again to pretend to fix it. All to project power into another state.

The irony is almost too heavy to bear. Chicago is now straining to house and care for tens of thousands of new arrivals who were, quite literally, sent there by Texas. And when that strain predictably surfaced in headlines, Abbott cited it as evidence of Democratic failure and used it as justification to send soldiers north.

It’s a feedback loop engineered for outrage, not outcomes.

The theater of fear of war

This is the playbook now. Export chaos, fabricate the need for control, then perform control. It’s cheaper than solutions and louder than facts.

Abbott’s migrant buses were never about logistics. They were about optics. They were about headlines, outrage, and the illusion of strength. But when the cameras moved on, it was Chicago, New York, and Denver left footing the real bills, scrambling to house and feed tens of thousands of bewildered people who’d been treated like political pawns.

The cycle feeds itself, creates the problem, cites the chaos, and sends the troops. It’s not governance. It’s a theater.

I don’t oppose the idea that states should respond to overwhelming migratory flows or crises at the border. But these deployments, obscure in cost, heavy in symbolism, and weak in evidence, demand honest accountability.

The blue city myth

The soldiers were sent under the pretense of rising crime. A claim with evidence supporting the opposite.

Decades of research from Harvard and George Washington University prove there’s no connection between a city’s political party and its crime rate. Violence tracks poverty, inequality, policing practices, and population density, not the color on a voting map. And the numbers?

Chicago’s homicides are down 30 percent since 2022. Shootings, down 40 percent. Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., are at multi-decade lows. Yet eight of the ten cities with the highest murder rates are in red states.

So this isn’t about crime. It’s about narrative. It’s about power generating fear.

The law, bent for show

Federal judges have already ruled that similar deployments in Los Angeles and Portland violated the Posse Comitatus Act, which bars the use of the military for civilian policing. The National Guard can serve at a governor’s request within that state or, in rare cases, under the Insurrection Act when law and order collapses.

Militarized deployments tend to have near-term effects in the visibility of deterrence or intimidation, but they rarely shift the long-term outcomes of public safety. Meanwhile, they are expensive (millions per week of deployment) and divert resources from local agencies that are far better positioned to act.

And still, there’s no insurrection in Chicago. There’s no war in New York. There’s only the theater. Expensive, dangerous theater.

We cannot solve shared problems with partisan performance art. We cannot militarize our way out of moral failure.

What I’ve seen

I grew up in places that taught me to love America, the South, with all its sweetness and struggle. New York, for all its size and noise, has never made me feel unsafe. It’s not decayed or derelict. It’s alive, imperfect, human, hopeful.

When I read that federal troops might patrol this city, for a danger that doesn’t exist, I felt a chill I’ve never felt walking down any street here. I wasn’t afraid of crime.

I was afraid of what it means when the government points soldiers at its own citizens.

The real catastrophe

The real crisis isn’t migration. It isn’t urban crime.

It’s leadership that treats states like rival teams and citizens like props in the name of division.

President Trump was elected to serve the United States, not just the red ones, not against the blue ones, and certainly not against the ones he’s convinced himself are enemy territory.

The United States is not enemy territory.

There’s no war here. But there could be one if our leaders keep creating enemies out of Americans.

If we truly care about safety, the answer isn’t busing migrants or deploying soldiers. It’s building systems that work, humane immigration policy, smart policing, strong communities, and leaders who still believe that unity is worth the effort. It’s everyday citizens with the courage to stop perpetuating fear and division and start acknowledging and fixing what that fear distracts us from.

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James Marlin, Investigator, Journalist & Keynote Speaker

James Marlin is a professional questioner, storyteller, dad, and husband with a passion for investigating. He works to distill complex findings into actionable and relatable information through his written articles and keynote talks. Having battled and overcome addiction, James firmly believes in the power of change. In the last five years, James has dedicated himself to investigating our beliefs, emotions, the conscious and subconscious minds, addiction, ADHD, mental illness, and the impact of technology on society. James is enrolled in a modern journalism course with NYU in partnership with Rolling Stone Magazine. Alongside his studies, he works as an investigator in the City of New York.